Fate/Extra Artist Arco Wada Talks Animal Ears

By Ishaan . November 11, 2011 . 1:31pm

Recently Aksys Games’ Assistant Marketing Manager, Aileen Viray, and PR Coordinator, James Xie, graciously asked if we’d like to shoot a few questions over to Arco Wada, character artist for the recently released Fate/Extra.

If you’ve played Extra or seen promotional images of it, you can tell right away that the art work has been handled by someone with a very different style from Type-Moon’s Takashi Takeuchi, artist for the original Fate/stay Night. With that in mind, we asked three questions to Wada-san, and she took the time to answer them:

Why was she chosen for the project, specifically?

Fate/Extra artist, Arco Wada: Kazuya Niino, the producer of Fate/Extra, had asked me to work on a project with him sometime, and at the same time, asked me if I liked Fate/stay Night. When I answered “I love it,” he then asked me if I wanted to draw a red Saber.

Wada-san has a very identifiable art style, looking at her website and her work on Fate/Extra. How did she develop this style and what are the places she drew inspiration from while settling on her style?

I used to draw whatever I felt like drawing, or at least what I thought was awesome at the time. If I have what is called a “very identifiable art style,” it’s probably the result of me drawing only things that interested me. It was only a few years ago when I first realized the sense of satisfaction that comes with drawing things for the pleasure of fans; now it is the most important thing to me and I predict even more changes for the future.

I normally draw inspiration from my otaku-esque formative experiences, such as the cartoon and comic books I used to enjoy as a child as well as derivatives of those works. At one time I used to rely solely on those things for ideas, but recently I’ve been trying to understand and enjoy what others around me think is great, even though it doesn’t always feel quite right with me upon first glance. It’s been interesting, to say the least.

The new Caster is an original Servant in Fate/Extra, and she’s anthropomorphic, which we haven’t seen in the Fate series before. Why was she designed this way? (We see other anthropomorphic characters on Wada-san’s blog, too…)

Caster is a character whose final refined design was based on a rough design drawn by Takashi Takeuchi. I didn’t expect a character with fox ears to come to life like she did, so I was very surprised about that. I think she is such an adorable character.

I like characters with animal ears, and often draw them in my free time as well, but it’s mostly meant as a type of hair style or accessory, much like ribbons and pigtails. They’re just so cute… It’s always been a challenge as well as fun to figure out how I should draw the sides of a character’s head where there would normally be human ears.

Thanks to Aileen and James for getting us in touch with Wada-san!